Competitors promise higher quality and smaller files, but MP3 still holds the public's fancy
Fast Times in Digital Musicland
The first week of May 1999 saw an incredible amount of action in the digital music world -- and set the pace for what has become one of the computing world's (not to mention the legal profession's!) hottest areas. On May 3rd alone, RealNetworks released its RealJukebox Beta, MusicMatch released Jukebox 4.0 and Nullsoft released Winamp 2.20, with support for Windows Media Technologies 4.0 -- a Microsoft audio technology released in beta form only days earlier. The new WinAmp also includes a change to the Fraunhofer MP3 codec -- a change made, in part, in response to a $20 million lawsuit against Nullsoft by Playmedia, which says previous versions of WinAmp used its copyrighted codec without permission. Microsoft, meanwhile, posted an interesting white paper about its DirectMusic technology.
Most of these tools have been updated since this "peak point" of May, 1999, of course -- and they have been joined by many others. Sonique has released several new plug-ins for its excellent digital audio player, including a WMA plug-in that provides support for Microsoft's Windows Media format, while LinaSoft has released an update to its EasyCD freeware CD Player. (Note however, that some versions of the EasyCD downloadable file seem to be infected with the CIH virus - beware.) Nullsoft released version 3.0 of WinAmp, yet -- oddly -- continued to develop version 2.x, culminating with the release of version 2.9 in the Spring of 2003. This version was acclaimed by many WinAmp fans who found version 3.0 too bloated. Microsoft transformed its Windows Media Player intop a remarkably feature rich player in a transition that behan with the 7.0 release and culminated with version 9.0. And, there are many other notable players. QCD is a popular choice with "skinners." In fact, there's something of a subculture dedicated to transforming the appearance of various software programs to look like other devices, operating systems or applications. For example, one of the most popular QCD skins looks and works almost exactly like Apple's Mac-only iTunes player.
We also tested RealJukebox for Windows PCs and, while it worked well, we can find little justification for PC Magazine writer Don Wilmott's unbridled enthusiasm, in his May 2/99 review, calling it "the be-all, end-all utility" and promising that it will change your music-listening habits forever. As proof, he notes that, with the new player, song files will only play on the system on which they were recorded, meaning that you can't e-mail that hot new single to a friend. Woohoo, Don.
RealJukebox, like a growing number of other computer-based CD players, can identify many popular CDs by the unique characteristics of each disc (e.g., how many discs would have exactly matching song-lengths?) and provides the artist name, album title and song names from an online database. However, in one of our tests, its CD player failed to recognize our CD song-list when we first inserted the disc, and, after an attempt to record a song failed due to low disk space, it wouldn't play the disc at all until we removed and reinserted it. It correctly identified the disc and listed the the artist and song titles after removing and re-inserting the disc.
Not everyone, we think, will appreciate RealNetworks' dogged determination at getting everyone to upgrade to the $29.95 version of its Player Plus. We found RealJukebox rather intrusive in its insertion of desktop icons and taskbar icons, and it seemed that, at every turn, links within the player's interface took us to yet another pitch for a commercial upgrade. There's also a commercial for Amazon.com visible at all times in the corner of the player while the song-list is visible. However, the interface is pretty cool -- it's well worth trying.
The Power Mac version of RealPlayer does not support RealJukebox functions, but does provide support for the MP3 music format and playback of HTTP-streamed MP3 files. Real released a version of Real Player for OS X in March 2003.Of course, the Apple market is dominated by Apple's own iTunes. This software's MP3 playback capability was augmented in April 2003 with the addition of AAC support in iTunes 4. iTunes 4 is available for Mac OS X only. See our reports on the iTunes Music Store and Apple iPod for more details.
MP3 files, of course, aren't available only to Windows and Mac users. There are dedicated CD players and set-top DVD players that can handle this popular format. There are also many other operating systems able to play MP3 files. We tested the Red Hat Linux 6.0 release, which contains a Linux clone of WinAmp called x11amp. This player, unfortunately, didn't work well in our tests. Perhaps not coincidentally, Red Hat left out MP3 support entirely in some subsequent releases of its distro. Currently, the open-source ogg vorbis format is gaining popularity in the Linux, while AAC is catching on in the Mac world, as is the Windows Media 9 format for Windows PCs. All are more efficient than the venerable MP3 format. And there are many other formats delivering enhanced quality, too. See our reports on mp3PRO and Shorten files for two examples. We expect to see these alternative formats gain popularity as users discover their improved quality.
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